


Flickers

by LouisaPeters



Series: Prompts [12]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Battle of Hoth, Character Study, Developing Relationship, F/M, Invasion, Love Confessions, Loyalty, Major Character Injury, POV Cassian Andor, POV Jyn Erso, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rescue Missions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-28
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:28:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21598129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LouisaPeters/pseuds/LouisaPeters
Summary: During the invasion of Hoth, Jyn Erso realizes that Cassian has her back. Cassian realizes it's not safe to live in the past and the both realize what they mean to each other.
Relationships: Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso
Series: Prompts [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1318196
Comments: 4
Kudos: 50





	Flickers

**Author's Note:**

> Hey everyone I am back hopefully forever. I started college and it was a really rough adjustment for a little but I'm back. I got this Tumblr prompt a while back and loved it. 
> 
> None of my ideas in this are really original or creative ideas but I like the way it came out and I hope you guys do too!

Jyn gripped the lantern in her hand and pressed her back to the damp wall harder. She clenched her eyes shut and watched the colors dance on the inside of them like fireworks as she took another intentionally long breath. 

She was going to be fine. It was only for a little more and she was going to be fine. People might not have liked her around base, but someone was coming for her. They had told her so. They promised. Right before her radio died, after the blaster shot had seard through her leg, but before she’d needed to limp to safety from the onslaught on invaders, they had told her that someone was going to come for her. 

The storage closet was small. It usually held supplies, but before the troopers, it had been mostly cleared out, save for the lantern she was holding, a large but fur-lined black jacket, and a few rolls of stray bandages and gauze. Jyn had already put the jacket on and wrapped her leg, but she knew it wouldn’t do much. She’d lost a lot of blood. Her pants were stiff with it and if she pressed her finger, even lightly right below her kneecap, she felt a dull ache where the burn from the blaster shot was. She wouldn’t be able to make it through the base to a transport, like all the other evacuated rebels. 

Anxious electricity and adrenaline coursed and jolted through her and caused her breath to hitch occasionally and she gripped the lantern tighter. She knew that the only thing that would ease her breathing was to let go of her necklace, leave the lantern where it was, take out the nightstick from her belt and beat the next trooper who came by to a pulp. It would have been so easy to throw the door open, jump up from the stiflingly small closet and limp as far as she could go, but that was a death wish and she had been told to stay put. Jyn never followed orders but she wasn’t stupid. They all had blasters and express orders to wipe out every last person on the base. She wouldn’t make it far. 

Her lantern went out and desperately her eyes darted down to it. Her breathing caught again and this time she felt a few tears prickle in her eyes. She couldn’t be left here. Alone, abandoned, and in the dark, but this time by a rebellion she had chosen to trust, not by her mother who had left her to throw herself on a blaster. This was her fault. She was stupid. She was stupid to trust Cassian, she was stupid to have trusted Han and Luke and Leia and Bodhi and everyone else on this kriffing planet. No one was coming. 

These last few weeks have been a blur of tinkling laughter and beautiful, glittering hyperspace as Bodhi taught her to fly, the smell of newly opened Sabacc cards and bitter Corillian Rum that burned, when she played cards with Han and the soft whisper of Cassian’s warm, Festin accent as they lay, limbs tangled together and hot sweat matting her hair. She thought of the way they would run patrols on base together, how she could see his breath in the cold when he spoke, warm and soft, and the way his eyes looked in the starlight. She thought of how he smelled like Alliance issue soap and smoking blasters and the way his hands felt when they pressed against her and she thought of how she tried a hundred times to tell herself it wasn’t intimate, it was just something she had to do to stay safe. It was like learning to fight better for Saw, never crying on Wobani, or make her voice crackle with fireworks when she spoke to her team on Scarif. She thought of telling herself that it didn’t need to mean anything that she didn’t want it to mean. She thought of how no matter how many times she told herself she didn’t feel anything, she did and no matter how much she felt something, she wished she didn’t. 

She was scared. Not in the same way she was of the dark or bugs that she could still feel crawling on her from her time in the bunker, waiting for her father who would never come. She was scared in a way that sent her heart into palpitations and her stomach knotted tighter than she would clench her fists. 

Cassian was there. He was real. He had come back for her on the data tower and he had followed her blindly to Scariff. He stuck his neck out for her after and gave her a home that she never thought someone like her deserved. He’d done everything right and without blinking an eye, but no matter how many whispered promises he made when they were tangled in scratchy wool blankets, she couldn’t bring herself to close her eyes and stay the night. 

The lantern flickers again and she let out a desperate, animalistic moan and slammed her hand down on it, partly in anger and partly to try to keep it from going out. It flashed back on, the light dancing on the hard metal of the walls. 

There was a time before this that felt so far away that she never would have stayed in the closet. She never would have desperately radioed in that she was hurt. She never would have fumbled the blaster for the sake of pushing Bodhi out of the way. She never would have told him she was right behind him and then took off the other way to throw off the troopers that had been chasing them.

A few more tears dripped out of her eyes and she wiped them away as fast as she could, but a few reached her lips and her nose and she could taste the salty tears mixed with the metallic taste of blood and Jyn knew that she didn’t have much time left. It was only going to be a few hours before she lost too much blood to recover from and she faded out of consciousness dizzily, or the door was bust in and another blaster shot to the temple roughly wrenched her into oblivion or the cold or the planet made her coughing and shaking cease, when she would close her eyes and be too tired to open them again. 

The lantern she’d had in the bunker had been a fusion lantern. It had been metal and rusty and flickering. She had pretended it was a lightning bug, one that her father had caught for her. It gave off some heat, so she’d been able to grip her necklace, huddle in on herself, and keep some semblance of warmth, but this one was much more modern. It was hard, cold plastic and it didn’t flicker, it went out. Seconds creeped to minutes and she would it it, hard, but it always seemed to come back dimmer than it did before. 

She clenched her fingers tighter around the lantern and a small sob escaped her lips. It shocked her. It shocked her that she made such a weak, desperate sound and she dropped the lantern to clamp her hands over her lips. Her eyes widened and she frantically slammed her hands around herself to try to find it. 

“Kriff it, kriff it all to hell!” She hissed to herself. It happened slowly, not at all like it had before, but the air had stopped smelling like cold wind and had started to smell like waterlogged underground dirt. The cold wasn’t just the ice on the planet it started to feel like damp, rainy cold that Papa had told her was good for the crops. Her stomach tossed the same though and when the door slammed open and too sharp, too white light flooded in, Jyn couldn’t help but think that this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. She was supposed to be safe. Saw or Papa was supposed to come for her, but instead there were three Stormtroopers, clad in the same armor they wore that day. Jyn looked down at her leg. It had stopped bleeding but there was still a dull ache and she knew she couldn’t run. Her fingers, still by her side from looking for the lantern, danced on the handle of her baton. She could get it out, flick it open, and then swing it hard. She could take out the first one. If she knocked him out she could get his blaster, shoot at the second and third. There were four, but if she took out three, she might be able to get a headstart and make her way to the transport. It was only about a half a mile to the airhanger and then she could-

“Up! Get up! Put your hands in the air!” Jyn closed her eyes and then snapped them open. It was better than the dark. It was better than the dying flicker of her lantern and the memories of damp dirt or the thought that she was scared, because she was trained for this. She was trained to withstand torture and to fight and to be on the front lines without a care for anything but herself. Jyn threw her hands in the air. 

“I can’t get up!” She called out. “I can’t move, I was shot.” The first stormtrooper leaned down and wrenched her to her feet. Weight on her injury caused her legs to buckle and she crumpled to the ground like a small white and black doll with wooden limbs connected by coarse string. Her head slammed against the cold metal ground and she closed her eyes.

She didn’t think she’d be scared before she died, but it didn’t surprise her. Too many things scared her since Scariff. Since Hoth. Since Cassian. She wondered if a blaster shot to the heart would hurt. She wondered if it hurt her Mama. Her eyes tightened and she thought of hyperspace, Corillian Whiskey, and warm Festian. She wished that she could have asked Bodhi what her father’s smile looked like one last time. She wished that she could have told Han that everyone could see Leia was perfect, but him. She wished she could have learned to keep herself calm like Chirruit and quiet like Baze and more than anything she wanted to hear Cassian’s voice. It was funny, she thought, that right now, as her consciousness was drifting in and out of a hazy fog, where she could simply hear retreating footsteps and blaster fire, that she didn’t want to feel Cassian. She didn’t want to feel his lips pressed hard, but gentle against her neck and she didn’t want to feel his fingers, warm and soft on her body, all she wanted to do was hear his voice. The revelation caught her off guard and she let out another small sob. 

“I’ve never heard her cry like that.” The voice was deep and low.  
“She’s lost a lot of blood.” The voice started to speed up, talking rapidly and Jyn could feel hands on her face. "A lot of blood. No está nada bien. I think it’s just the blaster wound, but I can’t tell. I don’t want to take the jacket off, she’s cold." Had she been shot? She couldn’t remember. 

“Captain, there’s three more coming.”

“Then take care of them, Baze! Rápido, por favor! She’s- I can’t just lift her, she’ll panic and she’ll hurt herself.” Jyn gasped out a breath. She didn’t know of any other rebels who spoke Festian and she forced her eyes open. Everything was foggy and hazy and she coughed to get the smell of blaster fire out of her lungs. The second she opened her eyes, hands were on her face, brushing her hair away from her eyes and rubbing soot and ash off her face. Why was there ash? There was no fire. Hoth was made of ice. Ice was cold, not hot like fire or the throbbing dull pain in her leg. “Jyn, Jyn, listen to me. We’re here for you, but we have to go. Now. We’re surrounded. Bodhi has a ship waiting, we wouldn’t leave without you, but we have to go now. Can you hear me?”

“Saw?” She whispered softly because that was what was supposed to happen. Saw came for her in the bunker, when her Mama and Papa couldn’t. She remembered that much, even like this. There was a frustrated huff and the hand in her hair again. 

“Jyn, it’s Cassian. Listen to me, I know you’re hurt but we need to go. We need to go now.” His voice was low and urgent and her head lolled to the side in his grip. He swore. “Jyn, come on, look at me!” His voice was getting higher pitched and his accent was thicker than she had ever heard it, but Jyn’s eyes darted to the side where her lantern lay on the ground, plastic casing cracked and the light was out. She blinked. Everything was dark. She could barely see the figure leaning over her and she could barely hear the frantic pleas. She took a gasping breath and closed her eyes. Darkness that she could control was better than darkness she couldn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to dasakuryo for all the translations! I'll have the second chapter up this week and I do plan on finishing all works I started and fulfilling all prompts on Tumblr, I just kind of wanted something fresh.


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